A very common way to hold a meeting and to perform group activities with widely dispersed people is teleconferencing. Teleconferencing is highly useful because it allows callers from around the world to participate in the same meeting at low cost.
Teleconferencing has been so successful that user demands have resulted in the development of modern teleconferencing “bridge systems” that allow callers to either dial into or log onto a computerized system that establishes a virtual teleconference. In such systems callers usually have to identify themselves, their access rights are checked, a facilitator is established, and operating rules are set and enforced by the bridge system.
Teleconferencing and the newer bridge systems generally support modern trends in education, business, and other group activities which focus on increasing the number and quality of interactions. For example, modern trends in education lean away from strictly lecture driven modalities and focus more on greater individual participation. In practice, teleconferencing participants are often looked at as resources of an organization, and as such the desire to incorporate those participants in decision-making at all levels has increased. This becomes a major problem as the geographic diversity of organizations and their participant's increases and as the need for better communications, such as teleconferencing, becomes even more critical. In fact, modern trends have placed such additional burdens on teleconferencing systems that even the newer “bridge teleconferencing systems” are often deemed insufficient.
The result of the foregoing is that more and more programs, be they sales, educational, marketing, or simply group meetings are being delivered and conducted via teleconferencing systems. Teleconferencing reduces costs, makes more efficient use of time, and makes a given meeting available to a greater segment of the population, including home or bed-ridden individuals.
While generally successful, teleconferences have numerous, well-known limitations. Those limitations are a result of, or are acerbated by, the fact that the normal visual cues available with in-person meetings are often not available in a teleconference. For example, it is often difficult for a facilitator to determine if one or more participants would like to transfer out of a teleconference to a different party, such as a sales representative, without disrupting the teleconference. Complicating that problem is that the different party in question may be busy handling other callers or tasks.
There are telephone answering systems that allow users to be directed to a particular party based on selected answers to questions asked by the answering system. Such systems, however, lack the ability to enable a caller to join a facilitator-led teleconference and then to transfer their call to a different party during the teleconference. Furthermore, such systems do not have queues for callers that wish to transfer to another party when a party is not available such that the transfer order is maintained.
Therefore, a teleconferencing system that enables a caller to join a facilitator-led teleconference and to subsequently either immediately transfer their calls to another party or to place their call in a transfer queue so as to be transferred to that other party upon that party becoming available would be beneficial. It would be beneficial if the transferring or joining of the transfer queue could be done at the touch of a button and without disturbing the ongoing teleconference. Also beneficially the transferred-to party would have caller information and transfer queue information made available to them on a user interface.